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Removing Roadblocks to Upgrading By Reviving the Old Core Modules

In the recent months I have noticed a increase in the number of clients that want to upgrade Dnn, they are often faced with modules that break due to breaking changes in the platform. And the older the module, the more chances it has of being affected. Unfortunately, we cannot do much for third party modules, but I feel nobody should be blocked from upgrading because of a module that was formerly included with Dnn. After thinking about it, I decided to take initiative and made it my goal to make all the old “core” modules work on DNN v9.2. As you would imagine this is not a task that is achieved overnight, but I’ve made good progress. Several modules are already current and in doing so, I think it fired up a new wave of motivation within the Dnn Community Developers!

Let’s start by looking at the modules that I’m targeting to get current...

Current Status

If you haven’t been around too long you may not know which core modules I’m referring to. In the early days of DNN these modules shipped with the platform and were “owned” by various core teams and individuals. Now days these modules don’t ship already installed, but they can be installed if desired. Though, a lot of older sites still have them and are using them in their sites, which is why it’s important for them to be current.

Status: At some point Dnn acquired Active Modules which included Active Forums, so the older Forums module is not longer actively maintained, but Active Forums is Dnn 9.2 compatible. We need to find and document the migration process from Dnn Forum to Active Forum module.

It would be awesome if you could assist, but you may be wondering how. There are several ways you can help us get everything current. The obvious option is to write code to update these modules, fork them on GitHub and submit a Pull Request with your updates. If you can’t write code then you can help with documentation or testing. Perhaps you are a front-end developer or UI expert… you can contribute updated styling and design concepts. There are always different ways to help.

I am also looking to start a sub-group of the Developer’s group to focus on this task. I imagine we will have a few meetings while we work to bring these current (see my next blog post).

Our Ultimate Goal: Seeing DNN Thrive!As a community our ultimate goal is to see DNN thrive. If our users aren’t upgrading because of stagnated modules then that is not good for me, my business, you, your business, and for the community overall. The good news is that with a little effort we can remove these roadblocks and make it easy for people to upgrade and get current.

First meeting

Stay tuned for another blog post shortly if you would like to join the effort and have our first meeting where we can agree on a roadmap, and collaborate on this project.

Hi Mike, for getting started with the development environment, visual studio and the tooling needed to work with those repositories, I made this video series here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLB6uzdqGF8&list=PLIx1M8IdVvqZ0bnODGqJyxvONNPj5BzMP Hope it will be helpful.

Projects should build without errors and a limited amount of warnings, I recommend opening a detailed issue if that is not the case so we can look into those problems or improve documentation on how to build it. We are here to help.

Hi all!@Daniel ValadasThe source for the repository is at https://github.com/DNNCommunity/DNN.Repository and seems to be C#. I've been programming for over 35 years. I've only dabbled in C# and Visual Studio.

I did manage to get https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform to compile cleanly with help from an article I found online by Ash Prasad.

A big roadblock is quickly getting a dev environment up. The Repository source is giving so many errors and warnings, it's very discomforting. I recognize some developers are tinkerers, but having a fully operational car to tune is much easier than building one from scratch. Would it not make sense to have the modules on GitHub with install-ready modules for the non-tinkerer, especially the core modules?